‘Hard for me to understand’: grappling with the Charlottesville tragedy eight years on

‘American democracy was failing the whole time I was writing’ … white nationalist demonstrators in Charlottesville 2017. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP

Deborah Baker’s new book, Charlottesville, is about her home town in Virginia, where in summer 2017 white supremacists marched, violence erupted and a counter-protester was murdered. In dizzying detail, Baker charts and reports the chaos. In interludes, she examines the dark history of a city long linked to racist oppression, from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Robert E Lee and slavery to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and resistance to civil rights reform.

Putting it all together was a new challenge for a writer whose books include In Extremis, a biography of the 20th-century poet Laura Riding, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.